This recent Coding Horror column by Jeff Atwood expands on a Joel Spolsky discussion, where it’s pointed out good programmers program cause they love it, not because of the pay or anything else. I’d take that discussion a step farther and use open source programming as an example; people do it because they want to; because they don’t want to stop thinking about solving problems even when they aren’t at work.
There’s a parallel here that I’ll make between programming and ‘normal’ art; artists and designers do the same thing when they get home too.
Ywah, but it’s the same with everything else.
Think about poeple who love any sort of science, a lot of people love to tinker.
It’s always the same: If you like it, you are good and if you are good at something it is ‘the art of …’
And you also have the same thing in classical art. There are people, who just paint to get money and people who love it. It’s the same with music, movies and so on.
And there are programmers, who have a completly different job, but are very good programmers.
But I’m nothing like that. I only love it to help people with computing problems :-)